Oh no, not again
by Plot-twister
Summary: sorry about the double chapter post; i'll try and recover the real Chapter 2 or else rewrite it (wrings towel menacingly)...more to come...
1. Default Chapter

1 Oh no, not again...

The sixth in the increasingly

inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy by Douglas Adams

For the Illustrious Mr. Adams: wherever you are right now, keep your towel close and your fish closer

Chapter 1

"It's not that I'm afraid of dying,

I just don't wanna be there when it happens"- Woody Allen

For many of the so-called sentient life forms of the universe, the problem with life is death: it is an ever-ominous presence that looms above them like a giant floating rhinoceros with severe gastro-intestinal problems, and sooner or later it will fall and they will be engulfed by the malodorous folds of eternity. Theirs is a life of running and waiting, and of getting extremely inebriated in the in-between. Of course there are some organisms that usher in death and in some cases herald it as a blessing. The Poidriff Consortium-perhaps some of the most intelligent, and insignificant beings in existence- spend their entire life on the outskirts of an inflamed hemorrhoid on the bottom side of a space port janitor named Tuckey Bergenfert. They lend copious amounts of time to solving all the universe's problems and cursing the day they ever came into existence, and when a member of the populous dies-usually from severe heat exhaustion- they all hold a tremendous rave, and the phrase, "If you weren't dead, I'd kill you," is uttered a copious amount of times in his honor. Yet there are always those select few who have accepted death in their lifetime and welcome it with open pseudopodia and a peace that cannot be described...literally.

It just so happened that this is exactly what Arthur Dent was experiencing beneath the flashing disco lights of Stavro Mueller's Club Beta seconds before the entire earth was demolished on all planes of existence throughout the perpetual downward spiral of the space time continuum. For Arthur, it was the ultimate proof that everything, as he knew it, had finally come to an all-round anti-climatic end and that after this there would be no after this. Unfortunately for Arthur, being wrong had become the premier staple of his existence, so much so, that the All-Knowing Huicken of Yillish had deemed him one of the top twenty-five insensible beings in the universe, ranking just below the Gusheldorf, a blue-green ogre creature with cowlicks, whose entire day consisted of trying to eat his own hand and whistle at the same time. At present, however, the big G's body hadn't just been dispersed into a million irrelevant particles and scattered across a vast waste of space. So he had that going for him.

Millions of miles above the writhing black hole that had just been punched into the wall of the universe where the earth had been, the sleek golden Vogon ship began to stir in preparation for its jump to light-speed. Within the grime-encrusted bowels of the vessel, Prostetnic Vogon Geltz floated in his jarringly uncomfortable chair with a feeling of utter appeasement. It was a good day when all the hates he had kind of balanced themselves out into one big "Screw you!" to the galaxy; he felt a muscle twinge in his face, recognized it as the onset of a smile, and was glad he caught it early enough to avert a full-fledged grin. His mood-depressing efforts were quickly broken by a shrill sounding communications klaxon, which he found to be particularly upsetting because his grandmother had said she might call him later that day to complain. "Why doesn't she take a one-way ticket to Traal..." he mumbled under his breath, which for a Vogon is extremely hard to do since their breath is extremely heavy and it is very hard to get anything under it at all. He punched a button on his chair consul.

"I REALLY DON'T LIKE WHOEVER THIS IS!"

"Geltz, you sack of rotten salad, how are you?" The voice on the other end of the line obviously didn't give a rat's behind about what it had just asked.

To the armed guard surrounding him, Geltz actually seemed to be startled, but this would never be repeated outside the room, on penalty of a poetry reading.

He waited a moment in silence, cleared his throat, and got to the point. "The plan has worked succinctly sir: the offending planet and persons have been removed from all plains of probable existence-" "Not quite Geltz, not quite, not quite, not quite..." The grouchy-sounding man trailed off for a moment, then heaved an exasperated "That will be all Geltz" into the crackling static and was gone.

Geltz seemed to heave an inaudible sigh of relief. Another klaxon awoke him from his stupor. "YES SIR? SOMETHING ELSE?" he demanded, very fluhurged.

"SIR? DON'T YOU SIR ME, IT'S JUST ONE INGROWN WHISKER!" his grandmother bellowed.


	2. Chapter 2

Before continuing with our story, let us discuss the merits of the Federated Association of Reincarnation Tradesmen: the merits vastly number in the zeros range and are steadily decreasing as we speak at a rate of 1 x 10 to the power of 42 merits per galactic antidepressant. Good; now that that is out of the way, we may move on to a bit of ludicrous history.

The Federated Association of Reincarnation Tradesmen -or FART, as it is mumbled under the breath- found its origins in the musings of a mad man named Fulbus the #. One day as he was thrashing about deliriously in his puce beanbag chair on the planet Nyahhhh and dreaming of hordes of Twinkies fighting gory battles against the Mohawk wiener dog minions, a singular and utterly incomprehensible thought began to form in the #'s abdominal hippocampus, and it was this: "I like Twinkies; I like Mohawk wiener dogs also. Neither should have to die!" Sadly however, his train of thought was interrupted by the advertised, but none the less intrusive entrance of a hyperspace bypass that leveled him, his home, and a gimpy cat with three legs, one claw, and no tail named Mr. Pretty. In this disastrous frame of mind, the # bounded into the afterlife with a new purpose; and in a few recently deceased Gulgafrinchans from the blue-green planet Earth, he found a means to aid that purpose. With the help of a hair-stylist, a used car salesman, and a military chap who'd taken one too many baths, plans for the first working re-assembly line began to be formed.

Approximately four quintrillion years later, the plans were finished; then someone spilled coffee on them and they had to start all over again. By the time they had worked it all out however, the universe had been destroyed, and everyone thought it was a pretty bad idea to be mucking about down there in oblivion. So the idea was lost for many millennia, and everyone seemed to be acutely happy and inflicted with vigor in their present surroundings. That is until an immortal by the odious name of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged (believed to have been a distant relative of Fulbus the #) decided that everyone was having a little too much fun, and dropped the plans through a paratemporal vortex that sent them back to the dawn of life…and death. Due to the fact that dead people in those times were much more intelligent than those corpses nowadays, the first re-assembly line was built in a matter of months. And due to impending mitigations, the monopoly held by the builders (the Grog, Glurg, and Thomas G. Borinthall Co.) was broken into hundreds of smaller vendors - known as the Federated Association of Reincarnation Tradesmen - who felt it was their civil duty to use the time rift to exploit the recently deceased, the soon to be dead, and their living families.

Astoundingly enough, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that seemingly unending abyss of knowledge, has absolutely no record of these exceedingly ridiculous circumstances and has this to say on the subject of death and dying:

"Probably no big deal; tie one on for us before you bite the big one!"

The "Hitchhiker's Guide to Eternity", founded by deceased editor Hurling Frootmig, says that the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is an uninspired scribble on the bathroom stall of life, and has a killer time at hoity-toity book-of-the-month clubs comparing it to "Fifty Things I Can Tie to my Nose Hairs" by Wad the Soapless (widely considered the worst book ever written). The Guide to Eternity opens with the three most important facts you should know about the afterlife:

1. When you die, get over that fresh post-mortem shock: there's a 1 in 420-octillion chance that this isn't your first, second, or even 142nd time here. Because of the abuses of the FART conglomerate throughout the history of the universe, most of the organisms which you find yourselves slumming it with when you die are the same ones which were present at the beginning of creation, just with varying limbs and new hobbies. In order to combat the subsequent rants of disgruntled customers complaining that the product they bought from him was inferior, a vendor named Degerbil found it much easier to wipe their memories each time they came back. Degerbil tried to get a patent for the idea when all the other vendors followed suite, but the idea was mysteriously wiped clean from his mind, which coincidentally now focused on his new job as chief Fillagrian gum chewer on Nyahhhh Prime.

2. Because each vendor has probably already seen and had enough of you and you don't even know it, they can be rather pushy and impatient, so make sure they aren't taking you for a ride.

3. Eternity is big...really big...or extremely small...or it could also be astoundingly...medium...in actuality, it's what you make of it. Eternity reads universal thought like the funny pages over a bowl of cornflakes, and knows precisely who you are, what it is your looking for in an afterlife, and why Mary Worth is interesting. Wherever you end up, don't get lost, because although eternity is in the multifaceted eye of the beholder, there are quarantined areas which remain constant throughout this one-size-fits-all wonder.

To avoid the vexing paratemporal paradox of Fulbus showing up dead many years after his idea had already been created, the powers that be just decided to stick him in an infinite quarantine prism with his cat and a few Gulgafrinchams where he could work on his idea without knowing it had been created yet. Each time he and the insipid crew of Arc B came up with the solution, they were miraculously pumped back into the system as contributing members of living society. And of course, no-one was permitted into the area, because that would cause a cataclysmic inconsistency, ripping apart the boundaries between reality and paranormality like tight pants on an opera singer. And no-one broke that most sacred law, and Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was still a jerk over and over again.

Of course, most of these so-called facts are so insanely impossible that it boggles the mind.

It's funny though, how seemingly impossible temporal infinities can be disrupted by the most Random of variations.


	3. Chapter 3

"nmbrfursgytvoo..." It sounded like incoherent mumbling to Arthur, but that assessment was ridiculous for two reasons: a half-a-second ago, he had just plugged his ears with his index fingers, and now he had no ears to plug and no index fingers to plug them with. He also had the feeling that he shouldn't have eyes either, and began to wonder why his vision was so blurry. "NMBRFURSGYTVOO!" Arthur swished his nonexistent arms about in the air-or lack thereof-and responded in kind with "blshksigswym," rather surprised that his vocal chords, which had just been sent into orbit around a nonexistent planet, had resonated so well. He reached up and rubbed his eyes a little, shaking his head and laughing to himself at how silly oblivion was. Directly in front of him behind a glass desk sat a pudgy, powdery little guy. "NUMBER FORTY-TWO, YOU'RE NEXT!" he said.

"AAAAAAAAAAAH!" said Arthur, and fell on his backside, really miffed that he had one.

Have you ever caught yourself in a look of full and unadulterated denial? You know, like that look you get when you are awakened in the morning by light blue puffs of smoke coming from an Altarian cigar held between the dull teeth of the 8 foot-tall, 320 lbs Bishanian Gorilla humming quietly next to you in bed and picking fleas out of your hair? Well, that was the same look Arthur was wearing on his face right there and then.

He was in a room that had been decorated in moveable paints: tiny painted matadors were being gored repeatedly by several hulking bulls, who then proceeded to sit down and have tea on the back wall behind the singularly grumpy looking thing sitting behind the desk that looked exactly like an albino balloon animal. "FORTY-TWO, FRONT AND CENTER," it said in a mocking baby voice. Arthur propped himself up slowly and guided himself forward with a wobbling outstretched finger.

"Whaaa..." The bulls had stopped drinking tea and were now looking at him over their French cuisine menus and giggling cheekily.

"Name, species, and home world, in that order please?" The gruff doughy mass kneaded its stomach, forming a clipboard and a pen, and swung its tiny breadstick legs around. Arthur drew his head back in horror.

"WHAAAA...?"

The glob sighed. "My name is Mr. So-and-so, and I come from The Nation of Idiots on the planet blankety-blank?" Arthur smiled lightly, smoothed his robe down, placed his hands delicately on the tabletop, leaned forward, and, clearing his throat acutely, answered with "WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON?"

The little man drew in his breath slightly, and then beamed back at him. "I see somebody doesn't want to rest in peace, ay? Oh, all right-" he scanned through whatever was on the clipboard "-Mr. Cobrice!" He chuckled, a little too much for Arthur's taste, then scribbled something down. "Your new identity is Tygathian the III of the Poidriff Consortium...Ooo, the newest member of the royal family I see...Very well." He handed Arthur the stomach pen. "Sign here, initial here"-Arthur absent mindedly went through the motions- "and look here." "Now just wait one moment, I'm not this Cobrice character you…oh that smells delicious." Arthur looked up to see the creature holding what appeared to be a crock of Swedish meatballs; his sense of idiocy was quickly overridden by one of pure hunger. "Thank you for choosing the Reincarnation Station and have a pleasant...well, since you won't remember this...go suck on a dead Horgathian earwig" said albiloon, scooping up one of the meatballs and flinging it straight at Arthur's face. The meatball hit Arthur squarely between the eyes, right when he was going to ask the albino thingy if it had washed its hands, and that was the last thing he remembered before everything went blank.

_Long ago in the annals of time, farther back than monster ballads, Tang or the "Where's the beef" woman, even before the dawn of existence, two particles of space dust floated aimlessly in a sea of nothingness without emotion, knowledge, or swatches. A minor shift in that vast nothingness, and suddenly both particles were floating towards one another. Soon, they would collide with each other, and one of the particles, for no particular reason, would utterly decimate the other, and send its component parts hurtling throughout the vast nothingness. If there had been anyone present with the capacity for emotive response, they may have felt an immense excitement at the greatest becoming known to the universe: the Big Bang, Genesis, Primus Biggus Mistakus. The principal consequence of these actions was the creation of the universe as we know it, but beneath the undercurrent of this monstrously haphazard design, one of the most completely coincidental, yet mind-staggeringly enduring relationships in the cosmos had just come into effect: one particle, which would suffer several reincarnations at the hands of crooked vendors, had, for lack of a better word, been destroyed by another particle, which was seemingly naïve to the fact that it had just dispersed its comrade through oblivion, and to this day, still does not comprehend its timeless vain of annihilation._


	4. Chapter 4

Belly Jurant's bar is as seedy as they get; in fact, if it were any seedier, several of its more anomalous patrons would be pecking the floor (if they'd managed to disengage themselves from the barstools). The bar itself was built on an asteroid somewhere in the Bellycoase System, and recently, in an effort to economize production and increase distribution, every Friday during happy hour, the bar is put on automated systems control and is miniaturized to the size of a digital watch face. This has several serenely positive and irreparably damaging effects. Because the entire facility has been shrunken, the libations needed to fill the miniscule taps, bottles and polycarboxidylacatate steins is exponentially less, and is usually administered via syringe by the janitor at the space port in which the restaurant docks. The change in size is also very beneficial to those up-to-scale beings who wish to get totally pissed in an extremely short amount of time. You see, the reduction in size of any type of matter is a tricky thing, due to the mere fact that it is impossible- unless excess matter is deducted during the process. The matter transference beams used to transport people into the bar usually take equal amounts of matter from all portions of an organism, including those higher functions which manage thinking processes, instill tact in speech patterns, and regulate bladder control. Other than this process hurting quite a lot, there are many other side affects. Because a sizeable portion of one's "higher functions" are dropped off in the coatroom before one enters the main bar, getting smashed extremely quickly and telling a swarm of follicle twanging Nargareths that they are your best friends and yes you know they'll find the right women someday is not uncommon. Later on, if you have enough brain cells left to even think about leaving the bar, getting the matter you were in possession of before you did what Geracticus of Nimbus has ranked as one of the 50 most idiotic things to do is a rather tricky business. You know how it is with coatrooms in bars: people leaving their hats, people throwing up in other peoples' hats, people having the same puce colored sweaters, or similar cashmere ascots, or eight-fingered gloves that look alike, and accidentally taking someone else's. The upstart of this galactic jumble is that you may emerge with someone else's higher processes and someone else's hand or tentacle cupping your chin or scratching your head with perplexity.  
  
Zaphod Beeblebrox had gotten through numbers 1-45 on Geracticus' list, as well as a myriad of Pan-Galactic Gargleblasters, and was just making friends with a swarm of creatures at Belly's who seemed rather interested in his body hair. He'd come to the conclusion, after surreptitiously completing number 12 on the list (sneaking into the women's locker room on Adjudicatus Prime, the planet of sue-crazy lawyers), that most of the universe ran on perfunctory patterns which amounted to absolutely nothing. And since this was perhaps one of the more intelligent thoughts his splayed and spliced brains had come across in a while, he decided to conform to a pattern of his own: that of getting totally inebriated, doing something extremely stupid, then repeating the process until he died or was heralded as the second coming of Zarquon.  
  
"It's not like we're having a party or anything babe," Zaphod's other head gurgled at the bean-like creature sitting to his left who seemed acutely aggravated at once. "Do you know how much smarter I am than you?" it demanded with helium-like fervor, and then tried unsuccessfully to pour a drink through a small blowhole on what one might say was its backside. Zaphod retracted his head for a moment, then in true Beetlegeusian fashion breathed a large gastric eruption across what he thought might be the creature's face. "Hey, you are some wet blanket, man! If you were any wetter, you'd have a species of mildew growing on you! What's the deal, lima?" He tried to muster a very pensive and nurturing look on his face, but only succeeded in making his other head look at himself in the mirror and giggle.  
  
"THE DEAL?!" The bean jumped up onto the bar stool and sprouted a single green stem abruptly from its orifice. "The deal, my two-headed lummox is that I have just been forced from blissful abyss into this dismal expanse of dust and flesh, and have assumed what one might say is an ideal status: as a prince among my people, perhaps some of the most intelligent beings in this galaxy, I have my choice of fine Poidriffian mates, receive advanced education in all aspects of life, and drive a really nifty blue beamer."  
  
"Freow! That is a wibbly deal man!" said Zaphod, trying half-heartedly to mimic enthusiasm. His other head, which had received less than a third of his now miniaturized faculties, was crushing Deborian nuts on the sticky bar with its chin. "The problem," continued the pot-bellied bean, "is that I, along with all my other brethren, are insignificant little pieces of bee dung!" "So why not," Zaphod made a motor sound with his lips and shot his hand through the air, "emancipate your sorry self? You know, go out and see the world, have a really wild time..." Zaphod caught his other arms lifting up someone's dress and heard his other head saying "I'm the presdint orv th'yooonverse baby" and smiled. "Emancipation is not practical," the Poidriffian raved on, "when you are only 2 NANOMETERS TALL!" Zaphod stopped what he was doing and narrowed his eyes at the now utterly annoying thing that he wished would go away very soon. "Hey man, stop bustin' my collective chops here!" Hey mulled over his third Pan- Galactic Gargleblaster from this particular establishment. "At least your not from Earth lima-"  
  
"What did you say?" The bean seemed to perk up, if beans have any capacity to do so.  
  
"I said at least your'e not a stinkin' ape-descended earthman," Zaphod got up from the barstool, sensing a fight was close. He had had the third arm installed for instances such as these, and had also found it rather useful in Beetlegeusian tennis, in which live tennis beasts are thrown at you at tremendous speed from all sides, and you must fend them off using only a stiff drink, a Kill-o-Zap Blaster, and something called a racquet that no one ever really uses. The bean seemed to be thinking extremely intensely; suddenly it righted itself. "You will take me to this Earth place immediately."  
  
"Why not," Zaphod mused.  
  
At the moment, he had nothing better to do. Besides, if he got hungry he could always make a soup with the damned thing. With some coaxing, he got the bean into his pocket, and surveyed the sloppy list he had hurriedly scribbled on his hand of awfully stupid things to do. Everything had been checked and crossed off so far accept for one thing. The mother of all stupidities, the crème de la crème: written in big friendly letters from the back of his wrist all the way up to his elbow joint were the words END IT ALL WITH A BANG: GO INTO A BLACK HOLE. 


End file.
